SATA HD Problems

[Acuity]

Hi all.

I had a Seagate 500GB External HD, one day, randomly, the drive stopped being recognized by USB on my PC, tested it on a few others aswell. So I removed it from its external HD enclosure to connect directly to my PC internally.

When I turn the PC on, with the data cable and power cable attached to my external SATA HD - PC fails to boot to OS off my C Drive, and just lingers with the on light on, and nothing on my monitor, and the fan stops spinning.

If I turn on my Pc, boot it all up to XP and then attach the power cable to the external HD, the PC immediately returns to the previous mentioned state....

People tell me seagates are quite reliable, so I'm hoping my 300GBs of data is still there...

any ideas? anyone :(

[Paul Komski]

A drive attached internally (IDE or SATA) that stops a PC from completing the POST is bad news I'm afraid. Double check the connections and cables or even consider replacing them is about all you can do. If you cannot get a drive to be recognised in the BIOS setup then professional data recovery would likely be your only hope. Jumpering can do funny things with IDE drives but shouldn't come into play with SATA. Trying in a second machine should confirm whether the drive is going to be recognisable or not.

Nothing wrong with Seagate drives per se.